Thoughts on librarianship, technology, and how they affect each other in the 21st Century.

Friday, February 25, 2005

XOBIS: "superior to FRBR"?

A friend and colleague alerted me last week to the XOBIS schema for bibliographic information, from Stanford. I've yet to fully read the documentation, but it looks interesting at first glance. I see some immediate similarities with indecs, although I don't know that model all that well either. My informant reported that an IFLA representative characterized the XOBIS model as "superior to FRBR." I can't wait to decide for myself.

I just found your weblog through the postcoordinated subject headings post (and then saw XOBIS mentioned in the recent posts section of the sidebar). Both Dick and I like talking about XOBIS, so feel free to send questions our way if you have any.

I apologize up front for the jargon in our XOBIS docs. We really need a beginner's guide. The other was really meant to document every decision we made during the process of creating XOBIS so it is a bit dense.

Dick has written something a bit more approachable for CCQ that is also up at Lane.

Btw, thanks for bringing Indecs to my attention; I was not aware of it so will have to check it out.

Also, the IFLA reference is this very flattering bit under "related efforts." I don't know that it means XOBIS is superior, but it is nice praise nonetheless.

Thanks for the feedback, Kevin, and for the links. Nice to meet ya'. :-)

I never did finish reading the XOBIS documentation - you've now shamed me into vowing to do that this weekend. I've already read a bunch that inspires me to talk some more about the project on the blog. I'm impressed!